OnePlus One will be the best phone for Android geeks, once it’s finished

As a freshman attempt in the smartphone market, OnePlus looks set to really knock one out of the park for smartphone geeks the world over. It just needs to actually get here already.

As someone who spends a decent chunk of his paycheck every week on the latest gadget in the endless quest to live on the bleeding edge, I find myself constantly rationalizing a lack of what I consider important features in a smartphone as not something the “average person” cares about. I want the latest gadget, but I am seldom the person this device was made for.

This isn’t a problem in every aspect of my life, for example, I have a PC that does exactly what I want it to do and my entertainment center is configured to deliver the experience I am most interested in. When it comes to my smartphone, however, I am mostly stuck waiting for other people to deliver the features I think are important, and even then find that I have to jump through hoops to get it.

Enter OnePlus, a company that appears to be entirely focused on delivering a product to the super geeks in the smartphone world.

I’ve been playing with OnePlus’ first phone, the not-so-cleverly named “One,” for a couple of weeks now. It’s a pre-production unit with incomplete software, and yet it already feels like more of a complete thought than many of the phones I touch every day. This has a lot to do with the fact that the phone is running CyanogenMod, a variant of Android that I have installed on so many phones in the past it borders on insanity.

In many ways the phone feels like my Nexus 5 and the incredible speed I feel when swiping around in the UI. Unlike my Nexus 5, the phone is positively stuffed with the features that Cyanogen, Inc has been working on for years now, and as a proper software company have been able to refine and polish over the last year. There’s a few new visual flourishes, like the new lockscreen, that make this phone feel like a unique experience instead of something I could just compile for myself at home, but otherwise this is a smartphone that was specifically built with a deliberate intent to sell to geeks like me.

To be clear, there’s not a lot about this phone that is particularly special. Oppo, the company OnePlus was split off from and is technically owned by, makes incredibly similar hardware that can have CyanogenMod 11 installed on it with little effort. What you are paying for when you get a OnePlus One is a relationship with a hardware company and a software company that value you as the target demographic, and everything they do as a company so far has proven that they are up to the task.

OnePlus has kept their marketing campaigns entirely web based, whipping fanboys into a nearly violent frenzy by mocking all of their competitors in playful ads and encouraging 100 future users to smash their existing smartphone in order to experience the One before anyone else. The same pre-production phone with unfinished software was sent to those users, because they get that these are people who place real value on the bleeding edge. What “normal” people would look at as embarrassing business practices causes their core audience to shout even louder, demanding that there be a place to deposit money so they can get their hands on a OnePlus One.

In case you hadn’t figured it out yet, this isn’t a review for the OnePlus One. This is an explanation of why I appreciate the phone as a user, and why I will be purchasing one as soon as my place in line is met with an invite to purchase one. OnePlus created an invite system to encourage this ravenous demand for a phone that still isn’t ready to ship, because the company is well aware that they are only able to produce small batches of the One and ship them to users. As a small company who is essentially selling their first phone at cost, this is an understandable frustration. OnePlus is far from ready to compete with the likes of Samsung, HTC, Motorola, or LG when it comes to market share, but they have made tremendous strides when it comes to capturing mindshare, and that can be just as powerful.

The geeks have spoken, and OnePlus has answered in a big way. In a weird way, everyone wins. The hardcore Android fans get a device and an OS that is targeted at them, and for every OnePlus One sold there’s one less person buying a Galaxy S5 or HTC One so they can immediately root and flash a custom OS on. Samsung and HTC are losing customers, but they are gaining time that would be spent battling these users as they void their warranties and then try to get a phone replaced when the screen cracks.

There’s no way to know if OnePlus will be here this time next year with a sophomore smartphone attempt that is even more successful than this first release seems to be, but if the company manages to make money off of this first release I’d put money on the big smartphone manufacturers responding with some geek marketing of their own.